


Five Hundred

by Island_of_Reil



Category: The Goblin Emperor - Katherine Addison
Genre: Ambiguous Significant Other, Childhood Memories, Community: MultifandomDrabble, Drabble, Drabble Collection, F/M, Gen, Homesickness, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Love Bites, Other, Scars, Sparring, Tattoos, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-03
Updated: 2017-07-04
Packaged: 2018-11-22 20:47:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11388084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: FiveGoblin Emperordrabbles.





	1. Delivery Received

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Trismegistus (Lebateleur)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lebateleur/gifts).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Csevet had a good night.

Csevet awakens to the gentle ring of the little clockwork on his bedside table. Sliding from bed onto his bare feet, he arcs his body in a joint-cracking stretch. Though he bathed before bed, he now strides to the washstand and splashes bracing-cold water from the bowl onto his face, then dips a washcloth into the bowl before lathering it.

His nightshirt is half-unbuttoned. In the mirror over the stand he sees them, the little violet circles peeping shyly out from behind the plackets. Heedless of the suds on his face, he grins.

He’s not the only one who bites.


	2. Ten Miles from Edonomee

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Telimezh thinks he remembers Edrehasivar.

Telimezh thinks he remembers Edrehasivar. He wasn’t Edrehasivar then, just Maia Drazhar. If one can think of an archduke as “just.”

It was at the weekly market, in Telimezh’s twelfth summer. He and his sisters were buying provisions for their mother. He’d heard an irritated shout — _Moonwitted laggard!_ — then turned to see a middle-aged elf with a deep-etched scowl. The man dragged a small boy, goblin or half-goblin, along. The boy’s ears hung low, and bright tear-tracks ran down his dark face.

Telimezh remembers thinking, _Gods, I would hate to be in thy shoes._

In sooth, he still thinks that.


	3. Riverstone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cala misses his small brother.

Mazeise and temporal powers must never be coupled, so initiates into the Athmaz’are forswear their houses of birth. Late at night, the dormitory soughs with sobs of homesickness. Luckily they are not forbidden from maintaining those ties, only from privileging them over their oaths.

On Cala’s last visit he made riverstones appear in Deleïs’s little closed fists. Deleïs shouted with delight: “Again, brother!” And Cala did it again, and again.

Mazei may visit their kin. Nohecharei may leave their emperor’s side only to sleep. Cala imagines Deleïs by the Cethora, low-eared, opening and closing his hand on a smooth stone.


	4. Zhasan

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the morning cool, before his shift, Csethiro and Beshelar sparred betimes.

In the morning cool, before his shift, Csethiro and Beshelar sparred betimes. She suggested it. He was horrified at first. But Maia was amused.

She’d lose herself in the dance — front foot to back and front again, step and pivot, lunge and thrust — until the morning the dance brought their faces three inches apart. She met his eyes and jolted, could see him jolt too. Then he stiffly said “Zhasan” and stared past her.

They no longer spar, at his insistence. She sadly understands. She loves her husband but ponders all the paths the gods did not set them on.


	5. Metamorphosis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He no longer bears an ugly scrawl.

“It is done, Serenity,” says the Master of Inks, laying needle and mallet down beside bowls of pigment.

Maia examines his left forearm. The dark-violet swelling matters not; what matters is that he no longer bears an ugly scrawl but a dense thicket bursting with spring-green leaves. A blackbird perches at its top, near Maia’s elbow, singing its praises to Anmura. In its middle has been rendered a nest of twigs in which a mother dove, worms in beak, feeds her gape-mouthed squabs.

Many times Nemer has insisted, “Beauty is pain, Serenity,” but only now does Maia truly believe it.


End file.
